


Not A Dreamer, The Dream

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 16:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4968532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dreamer twirls this new feather in his fingers and sweeps it across his forehead, his eyes, his lips. He lingers with it there, pretending he knows what it feels like for someone else to place their lips to his—feather soft and coaxing, out of desire and not obligation. A sudden anger burns through him at the indignity of the joke of it. How can someone who has never flown dream of flight? How can desire meet desire in a way that lifts instead of immolates?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not A Dreamer, The Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theemdash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theemdash/gifts).



> First, my biggest, most heartfelt-est thanks to halfdeadfriedrice over on Tumblr, who absolutely put just as much energy into this as I did. Any remaining errors in grammar, punctuation, or emotional logic are my own.
> 
> This is an AU based on a book called _BoysGirls_ , which is made up of beautiful myths and blunt metaphors. The title is taken from the book as well.

The Boy With One Wing stands before The Dreamer of Dreamt Things and waits for him to look up from the glowing, golden orb in his hands. Or no, not an orb exactly, because it shifts, spilling light out in lumps and drips before calling them back and coalescing into something like a shimmering, heaving idea. The Boy With One Wing has the strangest feeling that it’s something he’s thought before, but that he wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was then either.

“What is it?” he asks, hoping politeness will win him favor.

“It is the feeling of knowing that the monster’s claws are only long enough to scratch you and not impale you,” The Dreamer says.

When The Dreamer looks up the light dances in his eyes and it makes The Boy wonder if not being impaled is supposed to be a blessing or a curse. What is beauty ever but both? What is light but the engine by which the sky can be brought attainable, but also by which one may discover purpling bruises and whispers of scars?

The Dreamer carefully places the orb onto the left hand tray of a large scale on the corner of his desk. The balance shifts slightly, but hovers near even. The Boy wonders if it might be balanced out by hope, which he has found to be entirely invisible regardless of the light.

“What is your name and what is it you wish dreamt?” The Dreamer asks.

“My name is Adam and I wish you to dream me a right wing.”

“How do you know that the wing you have is not the right one?”

The Boy reaches back on reflex, grazing the underside of his one wing with the tips of his fingers, soft down and sturdy feather the same comfort they always are, if they are ever any comfort at all. “Surely you can see that the wing I have is left.”

“It does not appear to have left you,” The Dreamer says. His gaze bounces between The Boy’s face and the fitful dream. He reflects the light from both.

“What is your name and what is it you wish to dream?” The Boy asks in turn.

“My name is Ronan and I wish only to dream up root causes.”

“Then my cause is flight. I wish to leave this place, but I only have the one wing. Please dream me the right one so that I can follow the wind that calls to me.”

“What makes you think you can trust the wind?” The Dreamer asks.

The Boy has heard this question before from The Girl With A Mirror For A Face. She too reflects his light and the strange angles of his cheekbones and jaw, distorted by her understanding and her compassion. He asked her once for a kiss, for proof that her compassion was absorbent, not entirely a reflection of himself. He thought that a reflection of himself could be nothing but loneliness and he had demanded more.

The Girl denied him then, lips dipping back with a ripple into the smooth looking glass, but had told him that if he wanted to see what was inside of the mirror he had only to look. So The Boy pressed forward through the silver skin until his forehead and eyes and nose and mouth were caught in the plane of her breathtaking face.

Inside, The Girl was warm and volatile, a whole world falling to pieces and rebuilding itself with every one of his nervous exhalations. He wanted to stay, to watch creation manifest, but eventually she placed gentle fingers on his arm and pushed him away.

_That is enough understanding for today_ , she had said.

“I do not trust the wind,” The Boy tells The Dreamer. “I trust myself.”

The Dreamer nods, stands, and walks around his desk, picking through the clutter of objects that call for descriptions The Boy would never use: whimsy, precious, disturbed. The Dreamer stands very close to The Boy and runs his hand over the crest of the left wing.

The Boy is no stranger to curious, needful touches, but it has been a very long time since someone else’s hands have stroked his wing with such reverence. He tries not to quiver. The Dreamer plucks a feather from the underside with a quick hard tug. The Boy gasps from the sudden sting of it. To see a feather of his divorced from its muscle and sinew is a treacherous type of beauty that can only be found in tilting and falling. The Dreamer studies the feather’s barbed tip, its fine fibers, and its hollow quill.

“Yes,” he says. “That is enough understanding for today.”

The Dreamer places the feather opposite the dream on the scale and the feather’s side drifts gently down, making a low clink when the brass hits the wood of the desk. The Boy’s one wing twitches and spreads. The Boy thinks it must be making to recollect its feather, but what it collects instead is The Dreamer, who appears startled to suddenly be even closer to The Boy than before.

His lips are parted in a small ‘ _o_ ’. His eyes are steady. The Boy tries to press into them the way he had pressed into The Girl. This time The Boy does not get to be privy to creation. He meets resistance on lips that do not shy back and he leaves his payment in the kiss. When he pulls away his wing retracts, furling back in on itself.

The Dreamer is looking at him like he too is a dream, like it’s finally true. Like this time as The Boy walks through the town square and the people whisper after him and his plight he might be able to turn around and tell them that he is an invented, dreamt, precious thing. Like he has a place. Like this flight might not be impossible if only The Dreamer can re-invent the weft.  


* * *

The Dreamer of Dreamt Things enters The Librarian's office without knocking and launches himself at one of the overstuffed wingback chairs as if he is testing a flying implement from a cliff’s edge. The Librarian, long used to these sorts of distractions, does not look up from his tome as he says, “It’s early for you to have closed up shop on your stream of impossible wishes for the day.” 

The Dreamer does not answer. He sweeps the hat off of his head, drops it onto his knee, and leans forward, placing one tawny brown feather on The Librarian’s text. The Librarian reads until the feather interrupts his words, then he picks it up and rolls the stem of it between his fingers, watching the way the individual hairs of each section bend at the edges against the force, as if trying for flight. 

“Owl?” he asks after several long moments. Then, “No, hawk, undoubtedly some large predator with a beak sharper than his brain.”

“Hmmm…” The Dreamer hums. “Boy, but I have not tested his beak or his brain.” 

“But you’re going to,” The Librarian says. He has known The Dreamer for a long time. He is used to his fits of mania, obsessions and distractions, the puzzles that make his friend’s eyes shine, few and far between as they are. He always welcomes them. A Dreamer with bright eyes has a trajectory and does not lose himself to listlessness. 

“I could never dream such a thing as he has asked,” The Dreamer says, somewhat forlorn. He looks down at his hands, palms up and fingers splayed, as if waiting for the answer to sprout from them. In all the wonders The Librarian has seen The Dreamer produce, that has never happened. 

“You want the research.” 

“Everything you have on buoyancy and flight and the mechanisms that make young men’s hearts soar.” 

They look at each other in the quiet moments following the request. Neither of them has ever had a heart that soared. 

The Librarian pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Okay then, how long?”

“There is no clock on this problem, just as there is no time on the hearts of those who yearn for flight. He will not stray far without it.” 

“You mean to keep him close.” 

“I mean only to study and to dream.” 

“And to hope?” 

The Dreamer stands, twirling his hat in his hands. “I have yet to dream such a weapon as hope.” 

And with that he leaves just as violently as he’d arrived. 

“Ronan,” The Librarian sighs. With his name he says, _Good luck_. 

He twirls the feather in his finger for some time more, lost in the glint of threads of faintest gold mixed amongst the brown that puts him in the mind of angels and demons and other miraculous creatures of lust. He hopes, for The Dreamer’s sake, that his young man is something of an angel. He hopes for the young man’s own sake that he’s something else. 

A knock at the door startles him and he drops the feather back onto the tome. He carefully straightens it against the center crease and closes the book on it, the vane tip peering out of the top to remind him of his place. Then he takes seven steadying breaths. 

“Come in,” he calls finally. 

When the door opens this time a pair of figures glide past the rich, dark oak. One of them moves with grace, a woman of the most diminutive stature dressed in silver and purple, wearing a grey veil beaded with pearl tears. The other of them moves with an impossible lack of gravity, feet barely touching the floor. This second, an etching of a boy out of shade, is pale where the woman is deeply saturated with living. The Librarian deduces that only one of his guests belongs. He does not know which. 

The Librarian stands. “My lady,” he says. “What is it that brings someone so ornate to a place so humble?”

“You think yourself humble?” she says, voice full of the pith of sour cherry pits. “The humble would hoard the knowledge of the world behind such grand doors and thick walls? Why? Because they fear humility catching?”

“Words must be collected somewhere,” The Librarian says, trying to bury his affront in politeness. “In case there is an accidental truth among them that may benefit the world.”

“The world is good enough for truth then, but not for those happy accidents that create it, in spite of being the ultimate one of those accidents itself?”

The Librarian can feel his throat tighten, frustration bouncing the fingers of the hand he has kept carefully against the book. “And you,” he says, turning to The Ghost Boy. “Do you come to question the nobility of my livelihood?”

The Ghost Boy’s eyes widen. “You can see me?”

“Should I not?”

“No one ever sees me.” 

“Something we have in common,” the woman says. 

The Librarian pulls his eyes back to her. Like The Dreamer, The Librarian is a fan of puzzles. But he prefers his documented, concrete, rigorously researched and peer reviewed. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s about to leave familiar territory. 

“How can that be, lady? You seem very clear,”— _and alive_ —“to me.”

“It is not my life that comes under question,” she says. She lifts her arms and pulls two pins out of the back of her veil. When she does so, the veil falls forward, pulled by the act of gravity on its weight. It slides like liquid, a waterfall she catches calmly in her hands as he stares right into the empty frame countenance of The Girl With A Mirror For A Face.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he says. “I do know your face.”

“Yes,” she says, and he hears the sharp edges of the smile he cannot see through his own dumbstruck reflection. “Most do, for they only see themselves.” 

“That’s…” _Not what I meant_ , he thinks. _You are the most beautiful portrait this city has ever rendered of itself_ , he thinks. _I need to know what you look like to yourself_ , he thinks. _I need to write this down_ , he thinks. His face over hers looks full of a wonder that is entirely too forward. “What is it you need,” he says. 

She curls the veil into a coil in her hands. “My friend here would like you to stop taking his books away when he’s reading them.”

“I’m sorry?” He turns his head as if to look to The Ghost Boy, but he cannot take his eyes off his own reflection.

“He sits in the window seat on the third floor. None of you can see him normally, so your people pull the books right out of his grasp. If there are books in the window seat, leave them.”

“Okay,” The Librarian says. 

“Thank you,” The Ghost Boy whispers in her ear. He fades away, leaving them alone. With just the two of them left something in the air shifts. 

“And I,” The Girl says, “want to look like myself.” 

“I’m sorry,” The Librarian says. "I don't understand."

“I don’t want to look like you,” she says. “Not to you or anyone. I don’t want to look like my butcher or the mayor or the veinwork of the city’s gilded arteries built to match the insides of my arms. I want to look like me.” 

“What does that look like?” he asks. 

“I was told you were a man who solved mysteries. So solve me.” 

The Librarian stands behind his desk gazing into his own eyes for several long moments. The tips of his fingers absently run across the edges of the book and the point of the tawny feather as he thinks. Somehow, impossibly, he feels more foolish when he’s touching it.

* * *

The Boy With One Wing sleeps behind a tombstone and ruts in the mud, because the mud is his home. At one time his feathers had been white, but that has been a very long time ago now. He thinks this must have been a natural change, his color deepening with his voice and his want. He does not know that what you settle for colors your future as much as your past. He thinks himself beyond the pale.

This morning he wakes up later than usual on account of last night’s paramour having been more amorous than he was prepared to handle with her _see me, touch me, feel me_ and his answer of _yes yes yes_. Everyone who looks on a miracle wants more. It makes him feel like he has a place in the world finally if he can give it to them. He thinks that if one is going to be exiled from the sky they might as well make the most of the muck.

He sits up, pressing his back into the familiar marble block and drapes the knobby twigs of his fingers backwards over the top, stretching the kinks out of his too-lived-in body with its twice the aches for his years. A pair of cold hands catches his and tugs. 

“Stooooop,” he groans. “I am still too solid for this game.” 

The other occupant of the grave lets him go. The Boy pulls his hands back, balling them into fists and dropping them onto his thighs. The Ghost Boy follows them over and looks down at him from his inverted perch. 

“One day you will not be solid,” The Ghost Boy says. 

“One day I will not be here at all,” The Boy With One Wing replies. 

The Ghost Boy frowns. “You don’t have to be a dick about it.”

“Don’t I?” The Boy With One Wing does not remember what else there is of him that’s worth anything. “Why are you so pleased with yourself this morning?”

“Your lady of crystal and glass got The Librarian to stop taking my books while I was reading them.”

“We do not use names. She is not mine.” The Boy With One Wing says. And then, after some consideration, “What have you learned then?”

“Oh, many marvelous things. Did you know it’s possible to count by twos?”

“I think you knew that at one time.”

“Perhaps,” says The Ghost Boy. “It’s hard to remember life before this place.” 

“Yes.” The Boy With One Wing leans forward and touches his outstretched toes. He extends his one wing straight up above him and experimentally flaps it a few times. Slow and fluid, it is a dancer with a mind of its own. He shivers as The Ghost Boy runs his fingers over the tips of his feathers, wiping away the clinging mud. 

“Your dreamer was there as well,” The Ghost Boy says.

“He is also not mine.” 

"You said he gave you his name to use."

"He was just being polite."

“Someone must be yours. That’s how people work, isn’t it?”

“I am not people.” 

“But they are.” 

The Boy With One Wing leans back against the stone, letting the lingering evening coolness of it appease the juncture between his back and his one wing. Trying to calm that place where the skin grows more irritable by the day, waiting for its twin to balance the pain and weight of The Boy’s flightlessness. He tilts his head back and looks up through the long, dirty blond fringe covering his eyes and says, “You are mine, Noah.” 

The Ghost Boy beams down at him. “I am not people either,” he says. 

“You see, we belong together.”

* * *

The Dreamer of Dreamt Things may have never dreamt a weapon such as hope, but he has dreamt many other weapons, such as pride and kindness. He has dreamt wonders as well: the taste of blood in your mouth, the blue of the sky at two in the afternoon, the golden grain in the fields outside of town, the sharp edge of spurred bone that nicks itself and seems to catch at your skin from inside, the way you can’t escape your own body even with all the possibility in the universe at your fingertips.

The Dreamer knows he has never dreamt anything as glorious as The Boy With One Wing, even though The Boy With One Wing seems to embody every brutal and beautiful thing The Dreamer has ever dreamt. After The Boy makes his request and pays with one soft feather and softer lips, The Dreamer sleeps for weeks and doesn’t have a single dream. 

He sleeps for weeks and one day and comes back with a raven as black as the pupils of his eyes with a tongue just as sharp as his own. It is two in the morning when he scoops the indignant animal into scarred arms she seems content to scar more and rushes to the library. He bursts through the great oak doors as he always does, as if he is smoke and they are nothing but willow’s boughs. Barriers between The Dreamer and The Librarian have never been more than vague suggestions. 

When he finds The Librarian his old friend is sitting at his desk with his shoulders slumped, eyes rimmed red, shadows collecting on his cheeks and in the hollows of him. While The Dreamer has been sleeping and not dreaming, The Librarian has been dreaming and not sleeping, trying to solve the simultaneous mysteries of a missing face and the strength of will found in one delicate feather. 

The Dreamer is breathless from his dash. He holds the raven out to The Librarian, triumphant. “Look,” he says. “I have dreamed of flight!”

The Librarian looks up at him unarmed, no kindness or pride left about him. “You have dreamt a thing that flies. It is not the same thing as flight.” 

Bitterness like bile rises in the back of The Dreamer’s throat. “What do you know of flight anyway,” he spits. “Look.” With this he heaves the raven into the air and it spreads its sleek, powerful wings and takes flight. 

The raven rises and circles a few times. Gusts of air from her wings disturb the dust that shrouds the valuable books that belong to the adventures of The Librarian's youth—tales of unicorns and knights and sleeping kings. The Librarian had to give these up eventually if he wanted to truly live. This was a course of action prescribed by wise men and The Librarian always listens to wise men. Though he has been trying ever since, he has not yet solved the mystery of what life really is.

The Dreamer works on this mystery too, when he can, because The Librarian is one of his and he prefers for his people and his creations to be full of a light too blessed for him to touch. It is a constant reminder for him to keep trying to Dream divinity. He has not yet come up with anything for either case. 

The raven dives and snatches away the single brown feather that the librarian has been absently running his fingers over for days and days on end. 

“Hey!” The Librarian jumps up, tries to grasp for the feather. “Give it back!” 

The raven does another circle and then lands on The Dreamer’s shoulder. She is a heavy, solid bit of mind. She digs her claws deep into the fabric of his shirt and scrapes at the skin beneath. He is quite proud of her.

The Librarian moves as if he is going to come around his desk. The raven admonishes him with a sharp _kerah_! 

“Call off your nightmare,” The Librarian says. His eyes are wild and his want is palpable. 

“You must think something of me,” The Dreamer says, voice suddenly cold like the library’s marble floor, like the church steps in the winter, like the wailing winds from the north. “To think that I would let my nightmares anywhere near you.” 

“Shit, Ronan,” The Librarian says. “I’m...” Something dark and only viscous as fog leaks from his eyes and then he is just The Librarian again. Not terrible, not filled with want, again just—

“Gansey,” The Dreamer says, relieved. With his name he says, _Oh thank god_.

The Librarian breathes in and out. He comes around the desk slowly and reaches out his hand towards the feather clutched tight in the raven’s beak. Both The Dreamer and the dream are wound to snap. They watch him with twin sets of wary eyes. The Librarian’s fingers brush against the edge of the feather and The Dreamer watches something ripple through him. 

Once, when he was a child, The Dreamer saw lightning strike a pristine white stallion as it was running through a field. The electricity had rippled through the muscles of its flank like waves clawing their way to shore. The Librarian seems almost as affected as the horse in that moment, though the striations of what it is that ripples through him are invisible. 

“Ronan,” he exhales, pulling his hand away. “You should let this new dream take the feather and lose it to the wind. You should turn this boy away.”

“What do you know of flight?” The Dreamer asks again, but this time he wants to know. His voice is electric too, smoking as that stallion had, and he watches the fear of this new obsession also wind its way through his friend. 

“I have been preoccupied,” he admits. “I have nothing for you on flight.”

“There is a greater mystery for you than the one I present?”

“Not greater, more beautiful.” 

The Dreamer’s lips curl into a sneer. He is viciously pleased to hear that his friend has thrown him over for something that glitters and gleams. He has been missing this willfulness and awfulness since they were boys. He has been living enough of it for both of them. Suddenly, he can see a future like their past spring up before him and he wants. The want is curling tight in his gut.

“Ronan,” The Librarian says, sharp and steady. 

The Dreamer looks up and realizes he has been stroking the feather along with his raven’s beak. He drops his hand to his side, the want ebbing from him. Understanding lights up the dark interior of his chest. 

“Oh,” he says. 

“Get rid of it. Get rid of the boy.” 

“No,” The Dreamer says. “That’s, that’s the mechanism, but it’s only half. It’s only half!”

“Warped,” says The Librarian. 

“Weft?” asks The Dreamer. 

The Librarian nods and leaves his office. The Dreamer follows him across the echoing tiles through the cavernous rooms of collected lives, hidden away for safekeeping until they can be lived. They go up a flight of stairs, past a window seat with a pile of books on its cushions. 

“Good evening,” The Librarian says to the pile of books, and though there’s no one there, The Dreamer is certain he sees the flap of one of them open and close in a return greeting as they rush past. 

They stop at a dark corner under the hanging, wide-winged skeleton of a white eagle. The plaque claims it had been gold before death tore away its plumage and bleached it pale. As The Dreamer mulls this over The Librarian picks up books and drops them into The Dreamer’s arms. Once the stack reaches The Dreamer’s nose, The Librarian wipes his hands on his trousers and says, “I think this is a terrible idea.”

The Dreamer gifts him a wide, thorn-filled smile. “You think all of my ideas are terrible.” 

“Too true,” The Librarian says, and walks him out. 

There, on the glittering three-in-the-morning pavement with full arms and talons digging into his skin, sore all over and hurting in a new way he can’t name, The Dreamer takes a deep breath and concedes to finally dream up the devil weapon hope.

* * *

Once a week The Boy With One Wing goes to the home of The Girl With A Mirror For A Face for tea and to pretend to be people. It is a familiar charade made somehow easier when there are no authentic people around to confirm or deny his personhood.

It is a million times less harrowing than when he accidentally catches the eye of someone in the square—the women finding him beautiful, the men finding him pathetic, both whispering that life is hard for those who wish for miracles. He does not correct them. He does not tell them that he is the miracle itself. He wants to, but no one ever recognizes a miracle for what it is. When confronted with an actual miracle people are always desirous for something brighter. 

Here in her parlor they talk about the weather and compare the steam from their cups to the blues of the sky for which they make up words. The Boy With One Wing’s steam is heraquell, for its strength and left-footed odd greyness. The Girl With A Mirror For A Face’s is eapinee, for its clinginess and ephemerality. 

Their tea that day is the color of his feathers exactly, a thing she has been trying to perfect with her mixes since they first met, struck as she was by the beauty in the tragedy of him. He does not agree that he is a tragedy. He only thinks he is an act of existence manifesting in thin limbs and heavy lightness, a being of possibility like all other beings. He pulls a feather from the underside of his wing and compares it to his cup before handing it to her. She accepts it and lays it on her saucer, then places the tea cup on top of it, as if it might try to fly away on its own. Perhaps it might. Every part of him is always yearning to be elsewhere.

“You are being quite free with these pieces of yourself these days. I saw one just like it in the hands of The Librarian. You have not given in to the bully hope, have you?” She gently blows at her eapinee steam. 

“There is no possibility in hope. I am merely following my lifelong want to its conclusion.”

The Girl With A Mirror For A Face gives the air of having raised an eyebrow, though all he can see is the reflection of his own gaunt face in the serene pool of glass. He wants to press into it again, to make the lines of her quake. He does not ask. 

“Let the dreamer hope,” he supplies. “It is his job.”

“I do not think he would agree with you. I think dreaming is more precise than a winged thing can imagine.” 

“Ah, but I am not strictly a winged thing.” He inhales the heraquell deep, letting the heat settle into his lungs, trying to start a spark he knows went out long ago. 

“You are not strictly non-winged,” she says. 

“I am not strictly anything at all.” 

“Cheers,” The Girl With A Mirror For A Face says, holding up her cup with a small, fine-boned hand, because neither is she. Possibly, neither is anyone.

* * *

The Librarian’s days have felt slower since the feather and its urgency have been ripped from his grasp. Now he feels only his usual desire to know. He paces in his office, considering the problem of putting a face where there has only ever been no face at all, or perhaps every face. Perhaps, by definition, nothing always contains everything. Nothing is not an emptiness, but a burgeoning absence. He trails his thumb across the bottom of his lip and then sighs long and heavy before stalking out of his office.

He goes straight to the third floor window seat. There is a prodigious stack of books on it that looks haphazard in its curation: Encyclopedia editions in letters A, B, G, and R, a Latin-French dictionary, a children’s book of African birds, a dusty tome about flying machines. He makes a note to send that last one over to The Dreamer when The Ghost Boy is finished with it. 

The Ghost Boy himself is barely an outline, like a flash bang memory of a boy shocked into the gold-tinted glass behind him. He is running one translucent finger over a picture of a man clinging to a pole with a propellor on it. 

“What are you learning?” The Librarian asks. 

The Ghost Boy looks up at him and the imploring watery emptiness found in his eyes—true emptiness, sucking not burgeoning—tugs at The Librarian’s heart. “I think I’m relearning,” he says. “My friend told me I already knew the last thing I discovered, so now I’m rediscovering.” 

“That’s noble too,” The Librarian says. And then, “Do you think being dead is harder than being alive?” 

The shadow of The Ghost Boy’s shoulder shrugs. “I can’t remember being alive, that’s why I’m here. Do you?”

“No,” The Librarian says, because it’s what he should say. It’s so automatic. It comes from someplace other than his thoughts, some deeper, baser place that controls his breath and his desire. He turns this over in his mind. “Maybe,” he amends.

“Is that why you keep all the knowledge here, captive?”

“Captive?” The Librarian is incredulous. “It’s not captive. Anyone at all can come for it. We keep it in one place so people will know where to look for it when they need it.” 

“People shouldn’t have to look for knowing,” The Ghost Boy says. 

“I think they were looking long before this building.”. 

“Maybe I used to know that too.” The Ghost Boy flips the page in the book on flying machines. There is a picture of Icarus tumbling into the sea. The block printed illustration illuminates the elegant lines on Icarus’s face. Even in his fear he is beautiful. Below him, the water opens its arms to swallow him with finality. 

The Librarian furrows his eyebrows and tries to imagine The Dreamer as that sea. The Dreamer is definitely made of storms. “Perhaps the only inevitable knowledge one can have is that everything ends. We all fall.” 

“Not all of us,” The Ghost Boy says. “But if you’re only thinking of yourself then it’s hard to tell when the wind changes.” 

“And when is the optimal time to rise?”

The Ghost Boy closes the book. “Give this to The Dreamer, he’s not thinking enough of himself.” 

The Librarian accepts the book from him and watches as he selects the B encyclopedia and opens it to an article on convexity that The Librarian is certain should not be there.

* * *

The Dreamer turns everyone away and locks himself in his office. Outside people plead and knock and cry out for him, but he pays them no mind. He cannot hear them. All he can hear is the sound of wings, flapping frantically, trying to fly. He attempts to steal the single feather back from the raven so that he can study it, but the blessed creature seems hellbent on having his best interest at heart and keeping it out of his grasp.

Not that he can’t remember what it felt like to hold it between his fingers. It was like holding a live wire. The silk of each individual hair an electrocution, the loose strands near the base dancing with the shaking of his hands. He thought of clear blue eyes offering the barest of glimpses to an electric soul. 

Though The Dreamer tries again and again for divinity, he does not believe in saving people or in being saved. And yet, somewhere inside of him there is a miniscule spark that’s been lit, flaring and dancing in the darkness. That spark was lit by the traitorous thought, _you can save this one_. So he sleeps. So he dreams. 

When he wakes he is clutching a single white feather to his chest. He is thrilled. He is angered. This is not what he wants. He wants a match to the existing wing. He wants to make the boy whole. 

From her perch atop the nearest bookshelf the raven caws and chides him, because that is not right. He wants to make The Boy With One Wing symmetrical, to bring the elegant majesty of him to fruition. But perhaps, perhaps that is not what The Boy has asked for. Perhaps The Boy does not know what he’s asked for. 

The Dreamer twirls this new feather in his fingers and sweeps it across his forehead, his eyes, his lips. He lingers with it there, pretending he knows what it feels like for someone else to place their lips to his—feather soft and coaxing, out of desire and not obligation. A sudden anger burns through him at the indignity of the joke of it. How can someone who has never flown dream of flight? How can desire meet desire in a way that lifts instead of immolates? 

The white feather is steady against his lips in spite of the shaking of his fingers and the consistency of it strikes him. No, this feather is not twin brother to the desire of The Boy’s one wing. It does not bleed out want and want and want. This pure white feather is something else, a sister thing: Love. 

The idea of it confuses The Dreamer, because he does not know love any more intimately than he knows flight. How can he dream someone loved anymore than he can dream them the sky?

How can he convince a thing that desires only the sky to stay here with him on the ground?

* * *

The Girl With A Mirror For A Face has come to the library to meet with The Librarian and see what he has found, but she turns left instead of right and takes a seat at the third floor window. As she sits, The Ghost Boy comes into sharper focus.

“How do you do that?” he asks, looking down at his unexpectedly solid hands. 

“Reflection,” she says, because it’s all she does. She pulls a book on deep sea mammals into her lap. “Curious how so many things learn to survive with so little of what they need to live.” 

“I no longer live at all.” 

“Yet you survive.” 

The Ghost Boy runs a hand over his face. “If a boy survives the worst thing that has ever happened to him, but can no longer be seen, is he really still there?”

The Girl With A Mirror For A Face sits motionless, hands perched on the edge of the book, and stares at him with the flawless glass of her face. Her face has caused men and women and even cities to fall in love with themselves and mistake that feeling for having fallen in love with her. It takes nothing from her when these people think they are loved back, because she is merely reflecting the love they have for themselves. Somehow, this boy is taking from her and she can feel it. It hurts and it’s beautiful and she wants more. 

“What do you see when you look at me?” she says. 

“Nothing.” 

“Then you can really, truly see me like others cannot.” 

The Ghost Boy shakes his head. “I do not have a reflection to see, but I do not believe I am seeing you. I think you do not want to be seen, not really. You are a mirror because the alternative is too painful. Miss, please tell me what the worst thing that’s ever happened to you is.” 

“I met The Librarian,” she says quietly, because she knows where she wants her next hurts to come from. She knows what she wants to feel. She doesn’t know how to make herself do it. 

“You should let him see you.” 

“I’m trying, can’t you see? I set him looking for a cure for my affliction of reflection. I do not want to be a mirror anymore.” 

The Ghost Boy shakes his head. “Genuflection is not the opposite of reflection.”

“I would never place myself at someone’s feet,” she says, voice suddenly tight. 

“No, but you would ask it of others as proof. The Boy With One Wing told me he would not bow.” 

The Girl slams the book shut and pushes it roughly off her lap. “What do you know? You are not the one who holds the knowledge?”

“I am an echo,” he says. “I hold nothing, but I am learning.” 

“Why are you trying so hard to fill yourself with useless things?”

“Our friend wants to leave me. I want to make myself wide like the sky so he does not feel like he has to die to stay in the churchyard.” 

At mention of this fear the fury of moments before leaves her and she looks on The Ghost Boy so fondly that his form leaves an indent in the cushion. “It is not you that he wants to leave.” 

The Ghost Boy nods, face tilted in his sadness. “It is himself. You should look at him like you look at me. You could make him wide like the sky so that he can soar even on the ground.” 

The Girl pushes herself slowly to standing. “We have tried that once before, as you said. I am not the one. No matter how I look at him, he will not accept weight from me the way you do. Don’t worry, you are not the only one working to keep him. The pair of you, wild and wide, will be able to do it if anyone can.” 

“Lady,” he says. 

“Blue,” she replies, because if they are to share The Boy With One Wing they should also share each other. 

“Blue, you are beautiful beneath it all.” 

The Girl smiles. “And you, young spirit, are beautiful above it all. Perhaps you should join our friend sometime in looking at the sky. It might surprise you what you find there.”

* * *

The Boy With One Wing walks past the line of people outside the office of The Dreamer of Dreamt Things and pounds on the door. He waits. Nothing happens. He pounds again.

“We have all tried that,” says an angry voice behind him. “He will not come out for anyone. He is working on an impossible problem.” 

The Boy With One Wing turns to look at the woman who is speaking. “No one has ever called me impossible before,” he says, and his brow furrows prettily. 

Or rather, his brow furrows, and the woman’s face tilts from a scowl to interest in a quick change of masks that leaves The Boy dizzy. He reaches down and turns the brass knob. There is great resistance in it, but it twists eventually, for him. He pushes the door open and goes in. 

When the door closes behind him again The Dreamer’s rooms are dark. The interior waiting room is silent. There are fifteen paces between The Boy and the closed door to The Dreamer’s office. There is golden light and flitting shadow spilling out across the floorboards from the sliver of space between them and the bottom of the door. From the other side of it he can hear a flapping of wings and a lyrical string of curses. 

The Boy With One Wing takes a deep breath and fifteen paces. 

The door to The Dreamer’s office falls open easily. The rose-gold afternoon sunlight is filtering in through the white, gauzy curtains on the windows and making every bit of the clutter glow burnished. Even The Dreamer himself, who is standing on top of his desk and holding a large black bird in his hands. The bird has one of The Boy’s feathers in its beak. 

Both creatures turn to look down at The Boy where he stands in the doorway. The Dreamer takes advantage of the bird’s distraction and quickly snatches the feather from it before tossing it back into the air. The bird caws at him angrily and flaps about his head, but he pays it no attention. 

The Dreamer of Dreamt Things stands on his desk and considers The Boy With One Wing from his greater height. He is holding The Boy’s brown feather in one hand and a pristine white feather in the other. The Boy With One Wing stands in the doorway and looks up at The Dreamer of Dreamt Things from his much despised place on the ground. He is holding nothing except The Dreamer’s gaze. He feels dissected by it. He wishes he had the bird’s claws, wishes he could retaliate against this growing awareness of himself laid bare before someone who is looking at him and not at what they want him to be. 

The Dreamer hops down from his desk in one fluid movement that may as well be flight. Jealousy and anger start a brawl in The Boy’s gut. Something else he can’t place joins the fray. 

“I thought I was going to fail you,” The Dreamer says. “I thought your wing needed a twin. That is not what you need.” 

“How dare you tell me what I need,” The Boy says. “I commissioned a dream from you. I paid with a piece of myself. You should give me what I’ve asked for.” 

“No.”

“No?” The Boy cannot believe what he is hearing. 

“No, here.” The Dreamer holds out the white feather. 

The Boy stares at The Dreamer’s hand—long fingers, neat nails, graceful and made for creation instead of blunt and made for toil like The Boy’s own hands. Maybe this creature of magic standing before him could fly with just one feather, but The Boy is certain he cannot. He cannot fly with the several hundred he already has. 

“Adam,” The Dreamer says softly. With his name he says, _Impossible beloved_.

It has been so long since someone wanted to be close enough to The Boy to call him by his name. He looks up and searches the blue of The Dreamer’s eyes for the promise he finds in the sky.

The men and women of the town call him many things: pitiful, beautiful, tragedy, remnant, angel. They call him by the parts of him that they can see. Not a single one of them has ever put the pieces together into a whole. The Boy takes the white feather. 

At one time all of his feathers had been white. At one time he had known what this feeling was, this flood of sparks that pours through him now and seeks to scour him clean of the anger of moments and years before. At one time he had been someone else who did not yearn to leave. For the first time since he tripped into the mud, The Boy wants to stay on the ground. He feels full and warm and like he might possibly be good enough for The Dreamer to want to know him. 

The Dreamer has been left with only The Boy’s first tawny offering of desire. The Boy watches as the glow falls away from him. The sun will not deign to touch the creature The Dreamer becomes as the feather’s singular want and ache work him over. The Dreamer blinks. He licks his lips. He reaches out and places one hand on the side of The Boy’s neck and one at the juncture where The Boy’s one wing meets his back. He pulls The Boy close and crushes him in his arms. 

The Dreamer’s lips are hungry, his need relentless, and for several harsh breaths The Boy meets the ferocity of it with tooth and nail because this is the habit he’s developed in the mud, this mounting of pleasure and fighting off need and demanding: _see me, touch me, feel me, know me_.

_Know me_. A new desire whispering at the back of his mind, blinding white like The Dreamer’s feather and just as soft around the edges. _Do not take me unless you can take all of me_. 

The Boy pulls away. When The Dreamer chases his lips he places the feather between them. The Dreamer kisses it with a flagging ferocity that becomes something else. A giving instead of a taking. A blooming resurrection instead of a coup. The Boy uses the feather to trace The Dreamer’s brow.

The Dreamer opens his eyes. Their lips are pressed together, the white feather now cupped against his cheek. His countenance falters and for the first time The Boy sees who The Dreamer is beneath the fierce creature The Dreamer wants people to think he is. He is more luminous than the sun. 

“I only wanted a wing,” The Boy says, because he is clinging desperately to the version of himself that came through the door. It’s the only him he knows. He has lived so long in the shadows of tombstones that he’s afraid of the bright thing he suddenly wants to become. 

“Stay,” The Dreamer says, and it’s more of a sigh than a word. “You will have a wing. You will have one hundred wings. I will make you whatever you want.” 

“I still want the sky, Ronan.” With his name he says, _You are the dearest horizon_. 

“You shall have it.” 

The Dreamer drops the brown feather. He slides his hands down The Boy’s sides, pulls The Boy’s arms down, grips The Boy’s hands and carefully presses the white feather between the kiss of their palms. He walks backwards and pulls The Boy With him, beckoning him around the desk he had been so anxious to approach those many days ago. The Dreamer sits down onto a wide red leather couch at the edge of the office. 

“Sleep with me,” he says, tugging at The Boy’s hands. “Dream with me, you shall have wings.” 

The Boy resists. He cannot imagine being something as beautiful as The Dreamer could make him if he started from scratch. The Dreamer looks up at him like he already is. The Boy gives in. 

He climbs on top of The Dreamer and anchors his hands beneath The Dreamer’s back. He kisses The Dreamer—shoulder, neck, forehead, lips. His one wing unfurls itself, a dancer with a will of its own, and curls around them. The tips of desire's feathers brush the floor as the wing hides them from the curious gaze of the world. He lays his head on The Dreamer’s chest and closes his eyes as The Dreamer opens his hands, placing his palms flat against The Boy’s lower back. They meet sleep together and prepare to take from it what they can.

* * *

The clouds are blocking out the light from the moon for the first time in weeks as The Librarian mounts The Girl With A Mirror For A Face’s front steps. He would like to believe this sudden darkness marring his quest to be a coincidence. He does not believe in coincidences. He knows that sometimes the night responds to the anxieties of those foolish enough to wander out into it. Lost in a mental cloud cover of his own, he knocks on her door.

When The Girl answers she is without veil and reflecting a halo of nonexistent light around his drawn and worried face. “It’s late for social calls,” she says, and holds the door open for him to come in. 

He climbs the final step and follows her, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet in the plushness of her hallway carpet. Everything about and around her is soft and light. He has lived so long with hard floors and heavy doors he does not know how to meet the softness without bounding back off of it. 

“I’m here on business,” he says. 

She sighs. For a moment his reflection is softer around the edges. He blinks and then he’s gone entirely, no reflection but the white of the wall behind him caught in her pensive evasiveness. “Very well. Do you want some tea? It is the exact color of desire. I’m very proud to have finally figured out how to capture the dusty quality of it after all this time.” 

“To emulate desire is very unlady-like.” He intends it as a mock admonishment, but any authority is edged out of his voice by the warmth he feels in her presence. 

“Good,” she says. “I have never desired anything less than forcing myself into the shape other people demand of womanhood.”

“You are a wonder,” he says, before he can stop himself. 

The hallway they’re in is dark, but she is still reflecting a low glow back at him. “I don’t want to be a wonder. Don’t you see? That’s why I came to you. I merely want to be me. If you have not found a way to make this happen in all of your hoarded knowledge then you are useless to me.”

“You are a special case.” The Librarian cannot bear the emptiness of her face anymore. He looks down at his hands, wills the right words to sprout from them. “There has never been anything like you. I have never known anyone like you.” 

“Pfeh,” she spits. “What is knowledge if not a means by which we can carve ourselves out of the backdrop?” 

“Knowledge is adornment at best.” He clenches his hands into fists and grimaces. “You were right before. I am a coward in hiding. All that I have collected, it belongs to everyone, but that would leave me with nothing of my own. I am afraid to give it up.” 

“What do you see when you look at me?” Her voice is a low whisper that barely disturbs the air around them. It is as if she too is afraid. 

“I see myself,” he says miserably. “I see myself as better than I can be and it hurts.” 

“Is that all?”

“That’s all there is.” 

In the strained silence that stretches between them he hears a symphony of cicadas and crickets just outside her windows. What he wouldn’t give for a song of his own, for a way to mark this night as beautiful instead of just dark and difficult. He would mark every one of her nights as beautiful if he were capable of beauty. But beauty belongs to dreamers and he gave that up long ago. 

“No,” she says, voice clear above the somnambulant symphony. “No it’s not. Come here.” 

The Girl With A Mirror For A Face holds out her hands and he takes them. He lets her pull him close until the hem of her skirt is brushing against the toes of his boots. 

“Lady,” he starts. “Blue,” he corrects himself, feeling bold suddenly as her warmth seeps into his skin. He tries to imbue the name with every hidden scrap of emotion that has managed to escape his years and years effort of trying to turn himself into a being of logic. With her name he says, _I want this_. With her name he says, _I am sorry_. 

“I haven’t been fair to you. I have asked you for the impossible,” she says. “I said I wanted people to see me, but I wanted the miracle, not the work. I wanted people to see what they have not been given the means to see.” 

“You are standing in a dark hallway depending on the conclusions of tired eyes,” he says, realizing that he has just arrived at this moment physically, but that in other ways they’ve been here the entire time. 

She nods. A small wave rocks across her face like tea sloshed in a cup. As he watches the glass becomes more transparent. Over the now-returned ghostly shadow of himself he sees a whole life play out in a flurry of skirts and hair and leaves and fast moving clouds and thousands and thousands of other faces. He sees a world build itself up before him, so like his own, but so irreconcilably different in perspective that he’s not sure it is his own. 

The Librarian doesn’t realize he’s leaned forward until his own hectic breath causes the scene to fog over in the wake of his anticipation. He wants to be closer to all of the beauty he’s being shown. There’s an ache in his gut that he hasn’t felt since the brown feather was taken from him. 

“Press through me, Gansey.” She gently squeezes his fingers. With his name she says, _Please_.

He does.

* * *

The Boy With Two Wings stands in the gates of the churchyard and cannot bring himself to step forward. He keeps his back carefully straight so that his wings no longer drag in the mud.

The new wing and the old wing are uneven in color. The new wing is a glaring white that causes people to turn away. The old wing is growing lighter by the day, but is still the color of dust and lost time. Every morning he and The Dreamer stain his white wing with The Girl’s tea, so that the old and new of him match, so that he doesn’t look as off-balance as he feels. They do this and wait for his habitual wants to leach out of him. 

The Boy With Two Wings is not holding his breath. He thinks they will be waiting a very long time. They may have found that he’s capable of flight, but he does not think he’s capable of purity. He will never be a strictly winged thing, always half-boy at least with all of the prurience that entails. Even still, at night when they’re clinging together, he can feel hope spilling from The Dreamer’s wounds and bleeding into him. Every morning he wakes up as a dream in The Dreamer’s hands and feels a little closer to acceptance. It’s uncomfortable. It’s everything he’s ever wanted. 

Across the churchyard The Ghost Boy pops up over his tombstone and waves. Then he appears next to The Boy With Two Wings before the other after image of him has faded away entirely. He reaches out a hesitant hand and runs his cold fingers over the ridge of the new wing. It does not absorb the cold like the old wing does. It radiates warmth.

The Boy watches his new warmth course through The Ghost Boy’s hands. They melt from spectre into flesh. The warmth travels up to his cheeks, spreading across them in a pinkish blush. It is just enough warmth to lend him solid arms to wrap around The Boy’s neck and laugh into it. The Boy With Two Wings is startled, but he brings his arms up just in time to hug him back. A matching laugh spills from his throat and for a moment they are both alive and warm and sated as they never thought they would be. 

The Ghost Boy pulls away and watches himself fade back into what he is. In a voice tinged with familiar, practiced melancholy he says, “I am no longer solid.” 

“I will no longer be here,” The Boy With Two Wings replies. 

The Ghost Boy nods. “You said it would happen.” 

Quickly, The Boy adds, “But I am not leaving. I will be close enough that you can come and tell me what you have learned. I am trying to learn to be less selfish, so I will give you part of my new life.” 

“No one has ever wanted to take me with them before, Adam.” With his name he says, _I love you_. 

“Oh, Noah.” With his name he says, _I know_. With his name he says, _That’s what got me this far, now it’s my turn_.

“What is a miracle without a destination?” The Ghost Boy asks, looking up into the sky. 

The Boy follows The Ghost Boy’s gaze upwards. A single raven, another smaller miracle, wheels above them. “A miracle that has found a home.” 

“Is love a miracle?”

The raven glides down and lands on The Boy’s shoulder. She rubs her head against his cheek and The Ghost Boy watches with something like desire in his eyes. The Boy reaches back and pulls a single, undyed white feather from the underside of his new wing. He hands it to his friend. 

“I think you already know that,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> This is very different from the things I’ve written for TRC up to now. Hell, it’s very different from the things I’ve written full stop up to now. It’s not a straight* telling of events. It’s a fairytale and a myth. It’s a rumination on hope and belonging and want. And in the way of myths, doorknobs are hearts and wings are sometimes just wings but sometimes not. 
> 
> To put it plainly, it’s weird and I know it, but I love it and I loved writing it. I hope you also enjoyed it. 
> 
> (*In before, nothing you do is straight.)


End file.
